The following description relates to business systems, for example, an exchange infrastructure for collaborative business systems.
Software components that perform a certain function are known as applications. Applications are widely used in a variety of business processes, each being an execution of one or more Web services according to a description of an active business process. Business process applications are increasingly used in collaborative situations, i.e. situations in which one or more applications receive data from another application.
A collaborative application environment typically relies on a precise messaging and transport layer for proper routing, addressing and transport of messages from one application to another. Collaborative business processes, however, require a more sophisticated infrastructure that can execute real-time business logic.
For instance, in a messaging and transport layer, a message exchange system may transport messages as a payload in an envelope such as an extensible markup language (XML) file. The system may look into the envelope, analyze where the message is from, and determine an intended recipient. The messaging and transport layer typically utilizes a database in which to store messages for persistence, at least until processing is complete. In a business processing layer, data is also assed between applications during execution of a business process. The business processing layer may also require some type of persistence mechanism, however usually only a status of the process is stored and not the data itself.
In an integrated environment, in which business processes are executed on top of messaging and transport services, having two layers of persistency, each directly connected to their respective processing layers, can limit performance and makes monitoring message exchanges more difficult. Further, logically separate persistence layers can make collaboration more difficult where the state of each message is kept differently for each layer.